weigh station iphone app

Hi all,

I'm currently in the final stages of making WeighPoint, an iPhone app to keep truckers informed about weigh station openings.

The app is designed to be run while you are driving. When you get within 6 miles of an open weigh station, the app pops up a message alerting you of the opening. Then, as you pass the station, the app pops up a window asking you to report whether the station is open or closed. You can also add stations to a "Favorites" list to easily track whether they are open.

I'll be trying to release the app sometime within the next month or so, and I was wondering if the TruckersReport community had any ideas about features I could try to add. Are there any particular features that you would like to see in the app? Any feedback from the community would be much appreciated.

As if us driver's need to be distracted by trying to update your app so other driver's can be distracted. I'm not bashing your ambition but the roads don't need any more distracted driver's whether 4 wheelers or Big Rigs.

yea it's illegal to have a bird dog in your truck too but I dont lv home without it. I don't know about the updating portion but I'd be interested if DOT had portable scales set up or if DOT was in some scale house that was
closed most of the time.

The Following User Says Thank You to Crash935 For This Useful Post:

Right now the app is set up so a user can only input information about a station when he is at (or driving by) the station. I set it up this way to keep people from providing information about stations they are not near (and might not have the correct information about).

But I see how this could raise legal/safety concerns. Do you think that I should change the program to allow user to provide information about stations that they are not near? This would allow a user to wait until he is safely stopped to use the app.

Alerts about upcoming station openings would still pop up while the user was driving, but this would pose no more of a safety threat than a Garmin or something along those lines.

Also, I'm curious how often these stations open and close? In the northeast where I do the bulk of my driving, I rarely see stations open, but someone above suggested that stations in Michigan open and close rapidly. How often and for how long do you guess a station is open for?

In the current version, a user can only update the status of some station once every time they come within 10 miles of it. That is, for a scalemaster to do fake updates like that, they would have to drive to the station, update, drive 10 miles away and then drive back to the station before updating again.

Alternatively, I could make it so a particular station could only have its status changed once every few hours. As far as I know, the stations stay open for a few hours at a time, so I could program it like that without messing up the accuracy of the information too much.

Beltronics has an app kinda like what your doing for posting where cops are setting using radar. First 30 mins after someone pin points the cop it stays green then 31 to 60 mins if no one else updates it it will turn yellow, then 61 to 90 mins its red, after 90 mins the app clears the point.
Looks like I'm gonna have to get a smart phone, one of these days.